Not our master, not Keikobad but his messenger! Eleven of them have sought you out, a new one with each waning moon. The twelfth moon is down: the twelfth messenger stands before you.
Keikobad is monitoring the Empress’s fertility, as the Spirit Messenger says in Act 1.
Keikobad threatens to turn the Emperor to stone unless she obtains a shadow, though it’s hard to see what he has to do with the Empress’s lack of a shadow. Is it because they really like all of the sex they’re having?
The nurse says in Act 1 “He has not loosened the knot of your heart, no unborn babe stirs in your womb.”
Barak to the Dyer’s Wife: “If you give me children to cluster round the dishes each evening, I’ll see that none of them gets up hungry. I’ll applaud their appetites, and give thanks in my heart that it falls to me to fill their stomachs." (Touches her gently.) "When will you give me the children to feed?”
Dyer’s Wife to Barak: “Two-and-a-half years I’ve been your wife– and you have garnered no fruit from me and have not made a mother of me.”
Barak: “I don’t reproach you, my heart is content, and I will be patient and wait for the precious children which will come.”
The Nurse of the Dyer’s Wife: “Alas! And she is to bear his children, and waste her life here in obscurity!”
The Nurse and the Dyer’s Wife: “Have you wept tears of blood because you have borne no children yet to that block? Quickly, quickly, Do you yearn for them in your heart, night and day? Do you long for a troop of little dyers to trample through you into the world? Is your body to turn into a high road, your slim grace to be compacted under their feet? Are your breasts to droop and their glory to wither so soon?” WIFE “My soul has grown weary of motherhood before even tasting it. I live here in this house, and that man shall not come near me!”
Nurse: “Putting away motherhood for ever and aye from your body! And dismissing with that gesture of contempt the importunate babes that will not be born!”
CHILDREN’S VOICES through the fish: “Mother, mother, let us come home! The door is bolted, we can’t get in, it’s dark and we’re frightened! Mother, oh, alas!”
“.....Or call our dear father and tell him to open the door! Or call our dear father and tell him to open the door!”
Dyer’s wife, Act 2: ”I put away from my body the children as yet unborn, and my womb will not bear fruit to you or to any other man, for I have given myself to the winds and the night air, and am at home here and elsewhere, and as a sign of that I have sold my shadow: and the buyers are willing, and the price is glorious and its like will not be found!”
The Brothers: “She has sold it and prevented the unborn children coming from her body!”
Dyer’s wife, Act 3: “Placed in your care, so as to attend to you, serve, love and bow to you: see you! breathe you, live you! And give you children, best of men!”
Voices of Unborn Children, Act 3: (above, from the dome) "Listen, we will say: 'Father!' Listen, we will cry: 'Mother!' Come up here! No, come down here! All the steps lead to us!”
EMPEROR: “Those are unborn children, rushing down into life on the red wings of morning and coming to us, who were nearly lost; These strong ones hasten down to us, like starlight. You overcame yourself. Now heavenly messengers release the father and the children— the children yet unborn! They have discovered us, and come hastening down! (steps down from the bottom step”
Voices of Unborn Children, to the Wife: “Mother, your shadow! Look, how beautiful! Look at your husband crossing over to you!”
EMPRESS AND BARAK’S WIFE "Both casting shadows as we were chosen to do, both of us steeled in the flames of trial. Close to the threshold of death, to being murdered in order to murder, but now blessed with children, and we shall be mothers!" EMPEROR AND BARAK "Both casting shadows as they were chosen to do, both of them steeled in the flames of trial, but now blessed with children and chosen to be mothers!" (A curtain falls, concealing the four figures and the landscape from sight) VOICES OF THE UNBORN CHILDREN "Father, nothing more threatens you, look, Mother, that terror is already dispelled, that led you both astray. Was there ever a feast at which we were not secretly always the guests, and also the hosts! Brothers! Friends!"
The above doesn’t include Barak almost killing the Wife when he thinks that she has sold her shadow or the way that Keikobad blackmails the Empress into seeking a shadow by threatening to turn the Emperor to stone.
It's really beyond me how you can read the above (not to mention seeing the opera) and not conclude that yes, this opera is, front and center, about having children, and how having children is necessary for women to be fully human.
These points didn't evade Joshua Kosman, who got up on his soapbox about Frau in July, 2022, a year prior to the SFO production, and they're not evading Zachary Woolfe, who reviewed the opera in the NY Times this week ("You might think a four-hour allegorical ode to pregnancy isn’t your thing. But I’m here to tell you: Just go."). I'm going to slightly argue with Woolfe's description of Barak as kindly. The text suggests that his Wife is basically a slave, that she's someone he paid for.
Nobody is denying that one of the central points of this opera is the Empress's transformation as she realizes that she cannot take the shadow from the Dyer's Wife, one of the great moments in all opera, but neither are they denying the opera's focus on fertility and babies. And Joshua Kosman was clear about how this opera lands at a moment when the right wing in the United States has not only gotten Roe v. Wade struck down, it is openly discussing restricting access to contraception, doing away with no-fault divorce, and so on. If somehow this isn't pretty clear to you after reading the above excerpts, well, read them a few more times.
3 comments:
It is 100% about babies, and companies are going to have to be very, very careful about how they stage it in an era of right-wing conspiracies about "white replacement" and such BS.
Yep. Have you seen the LENGTHY discussion on FB about this post and the opera?
Notice that in this moral universe, it's not so much the unborn who have a right to life, but the unconceived. The plot does not address abortion, as you noticed, but it does criticize not getting pregnant - not in the JD Vance "the world must be peopled" way, but urging the right of souls in unborn limbo to acquire bodies. Here, we are all nothing more than vessels for the next generation.
The only other fictional depiction of this viewpoint that I've seen is in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, where the resurrected Merlin criticizes Mark and Jane, a married couple, for refraining from conceiving. (I don't think they even used medical birth control.) He says the child they could have had would have been the next Pendragon. But now, he says, that won't happen, even of any child they might subsequently have.
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